So this year I bought a 3D printed tiny Super Nintendo Case and put a Raspberry Pi 3 in it. At first, my only concern was to have a RetroPie setup, because of my childhood love of legally obtained ROMs. This part was easy enough and obtainable in one sitting. Putting a RetroPie together is quick and easy, and those guys have really done a great job bridging the gap between a terminal driven configuration and controller-only input.

So I have this pet theory that phones and tablets are a transitional forms and in the not-to-distant future we won’t carry around those stupid devices. Eventually stuff like Intel RealSense will get to a point where when you pick up a device, settings are pulled from the internet, and you’re instantly in a userspace that’s richer and just as customizable as anything going.

I find myself defending Gnome Shell far more than I’d ever thought warrented. It’s never from Unity fans - those guys associate linux with purple terminals and see Gnome as some fancy alternative they don’t know how to install. Every once in a while an xmonad user will shit all over the mouse driven DE and thise pompous need for cascading windows, but those guys generally know they represent the evil hacker lot. Some folks will favor Cinnamon or XFCE, but generally they conflate a theme they like with the bonefides of the software they’re running, and in Cinnamon’s case they don’t realize they’re pretty much running Gnome anyways. I’ve yet to meet someone in the wild running KDE Plasma 5, but I imagine those guys probably have it pretty good too with their KDEConnect and nice Vista-y blur effects. I wouldn’t trade it, though. Gnome’s found it’s way to the default desktop of many linux distrobutions, and it’s the default shell for when I login to my heart.

I wanted to put together a little walk through to get the new Dell XPS 15 9550 laptop working well in Linux. I’ve been very happy with it so far, but I had to put in a few nights of research to really get it working as I want.

I’m blassed with a job that’s actively looking to step up their hardware game. So after a few nights of googling, I went to our IT guy and I was able to pursuade him to order the new Dell XPS 15 Non-touch 9550 P56F. My model has a Intel Core i7-6700HQ with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512gb SSD on a PCI-e bus. Sickeningly awesome system. It hangs with my MBP but I still miss the trackpad. The MBP feels better and is less plastically, but the internals are better on the Dell side, and while it’s a little thicker than the MBP, it’s hardly noticable and Dell hides it pretty well.

For years, I’ve ran some flavor of Linux on all my hardware. Lately, however, I awoke to discover that I’ve inadvertently factored out all my Linux boxes. It was innocuous enough. I’ve lent out my Linux desktop to a friend in need, and have mostly replaced it with a Microsoft Surface running Windows 10 and my newly acquired work laptop. My desktop at work was a bit of an anchor to a desk I no longer wanted, and so I traded in my two monitor Fedora box for a shiny new Macbook Pro. I might have gotten a Linux laptop, if the only thing on offer wasn’t an offensive MSI gaming laptop with rainbow backlit keys. Ick. I’m a web developer, so the Pro has mostly been a good experience for me. I experimented with Magento and PHP7 after about six minutes worth of work, I have most of the toolset I’m used to on Linux, and the battery life is truly outstanding compared to comparable Linux-running laptops I’ve seen.

I recently bought a TV with HDMI-CEC support, which could be one of the coolest features introduced to displays in a long long time. It’s kinda like IR over HDMI. It allows the TV to auto-switch sources, turn on and off, all depending on what you’re doing with the devices connected to it. The Chromecast turns on the display and switches input when you try and stream to it. My Steam Link will switch TV inputs and take control when I press the Steam button on the controller. This will replace the TV remote control by factoring it out entirely.

Ever since I’ve moved into a bigger apartment I’ve lusted over a multi-room speaker setup so we can play audio everywhere in the house. Google’s new Chromecast Audio gives me the makings of this, with the recent update it lets you place Chromecasts in a ‘group’ where they all play simutaniously. In my house, I made such a group and named it ‘Everwhere’. You can play Youtube or Spotify to ‘everywhere’ and in every room it starts playing (pretty much) in sync.

Logitech’s MX Master is perhaps one of the best mice available at the moment. Supporting both Bluetooth and the Unifying Receiver, loads of buttons, a vertical scroll wheel and micro-usb rechargable battery, it’s hard to go wrong with this thing. Unfortunately, the default key mappings on my linux desktop (Gnome 3) are terrible. The thumb button doesn’t do anything, and the vertical scroll does god knows what.

I'm just some guy with a laptop and not enough time on my hands. Here's hoping that with a little love and care this sapling mess of html and markdown will keep growing. I'll try to keep my contributions short and useful!